1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing apparatus and method and a program, and in particular to, for example, an information processing apparatus, a method and a program preferable to use when recognizing an image of a specific object using a tree-structure recognition device from a specific image and preferable to use when appropriately creating the tree structure.
2. Description of the Related Art
When recognizing a target object that has many variations when looking from inside of an image, there is a method in the related art where an operation is split between a plurality of recognition devices. As one recognition technology of this type, an object recognition device which has a tree structure is being studied. In the field of facial recognition, recognition devices using tree structures designed by human beings are studied and it is described that faces are detected in “Vector Boosting for Rotation Invariant Multi-View Face Detection,” C. Huang, H. Z. Ai, Y. Li and S. H. Lao Proc. 10th IEEE Int'l Conf. Computer Vision, 2005 (non-patent document 1); “A Detector Tree of Boosted Classifiers for Real-time Object Detection and Tracking,” R. Lienhart, L. Liang, A. Kuranov, Proceedings of the 2003 International Conference on Multimedia and Expo—Volume 1 (non-patent document 2); “Multi-view Face Pose Classification by Tree-structured Classifier,” Zhiguang Yang, Haizhou Ai, Okamoto T., Shihong Lao, Image Processing, 2005, ICIP 2005, IEEE International Conference on Volume 2, 11-14 Sep. 2005 Pages 11-358-61 (non-patent document 3); “A boosted Classifier Tree for Hand Shape Detection,” E. J. Ong and R. Bowden, Face and Gesture Recognition, 2004 (non-patent document 4).
In order to make a tree structure for a person recognition device, a method is proposed in “Cluster Boosted Tree Classifier for Multi-View, Multi-Pose Object Detection,” Bo Wu, Nevatia, R.ICCV 2007, IEEE 11th International Conference on Computer Vision, 14-21 Oct. 2007 pages 1-8 (non-patent document 5), where a tree structure is automatically constructed without an instructor using a WK (weak learner) characteristic. A method for a multi-view facial recognition device is proposed in “Sharing Visual Features for Multiclass and Multiview Object Detection,” A. Torralba, K. P. Murphy and W. T. Freeman, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, vol. 29, no. 5, pp. 854-869, May 2007 (non-patent document 6), and “Fast Multi-View Face Detection,” M. Jones and P. Viola, MERLTR 2003-96, July 2003 (non-patent document 7), where a posture estimation device is input at an early stage and a normal recognition device is used after normalization by rotation.